About

Extreme Wearables Designathon

On Fri-Sat-Sun June 27-28-29, 2014 the Media Design Practices graduate program (MDP) at Art Center College of Design (ACCD) held the Extreme Wearables Designathon (XWD) in their Wind Tunnel facility on the ACCD South Campus in Pasadena, California. On Friday night we pitched lots of ideas and formed teams. On Saturday morning we played creative games and defined needs. Saturday afternoon, evening & Sunday morning we created Wearable Design Solutions.

Team

David Wang is a staff engineer of Qualcomm Technology Inc. working on projects to develop industry-leas multi-mode modem chipsets for smartphone and tablet.

Glenn Zucman is a new media & identity artist. He teaches at the School of Art at Long Beach State.

Joseph Kan is a industrial designer with a product design background at Art Center College of Design.

Natalia Fedner is a haute couture fashion designer who has worked in Paris, New York & Los Angeles.

Samy Kamkar is a hacker and security analyst. In 2013 he created Zombie Drone software allowing one drone to hijack another.

Sharon Gong is a senior business system analyst of Newegg Inc, in charge of all mobile channels including one mobile site and seven mobile apps for different platforms.

Vivia & Sharon

Susan Zhang is an industrial designer who is working on her second bachelor’s degree in product design at Art Center College of Design.

Vivia Liu is an integrated designer and creative explorer, who has not only aesthetic communication, modeling abilities, and Chinese user probe, but also hand on experience with engineering and manufacturing process.

Hirez Images

Terms of Use

Our plan is for Compass H2O to be an open source project. Development materials will probably be on GitHub & the content of this site will probably have a Creative Commons license. However the whole project is brand new and those details are not yet finalized. If you’re interested in using any of our code, hardware, images, text, or ideas, check back soon. Or drop us a note via our contact form.

David, Susan & Samy going over slides a few minutes before our Sunday afternoon presentation at the MDP Wind Tunnel.

Thank You!

There are so many people to thank for this short, whirlwind Team & Design experience in Wearable Tech!

Samy working through ideas with a little assistance from the endlessly helpful Meg Grant & Syuzi Pakchyan

Saturday morning when we played our development game our newly formed team of 8 had a tough time converging on an idea, or even generating compelling ideas at all. Every time Syuzi and Magdalena came by our station I always felt so utterly hopeless for the progress we hadn’t made and was slowly admitting to myself that we were going to be the one team that was simply a total fail. In spite of our lack of progress, Syuzi & Magdalena were endlessly patient and supportive and helped us eventually find a use case that all 8 of us were passionate about.

It was a great relief in the week after XWD to talk with Charmy Chu from the 1st place Emoty team and learn that they had been equally “hopeless” and that she’d felt equally disappointing when Syuzi & Magdalena came to check on their progress. 25 hours later I found Emoty’s use case to be truly sublime, and the judges’ response to their presentation was palpable, even in the cavernous MDP Wind Tunnel.